by Jason Porath
Their story starts happily, with both Mancinis as young girls in the limelight of the French courts. Their uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, the chief minister of France, had gathered several of his young female relatives with the aim of marrying them off and solidifying the family’s standings. Hortense and Marie dazzled the courtiers, and at the respective ages of 12 and 19 were the talk of the town.
Unfortunately, their uncle had exceptionally poor taste in men.
Marie’s first love was one of the greatest figures in French history, Louis XIV. Their mutual romance was the stuff of epic poetry—from the moment Louis fell ill and Marie looked after him, they were practically inseparable. He loved her as intensely as she loved him. When Marie received a light bruise from bumping into his sword, he instantly threw it away, even though it was an expensive heirloom.
Their marriage was not strategically optimal for France. Cardinal Mazarin and Louis’s mother, sharing a classic aristocratic view of marriage, combined forces to show the young lovers that life is supposed to be gray and horrible. They separated the two and married Louis off to another woman.
Even so, the two wrote letters to each other on a nearly daily basis. Gradually, however, the frequency of the letters declined and the frequency of courtier gossip ramped up. Finally, Marie, heartbroken and miserable, begged her uncle to find her a husband in order to silence the incessant mockery. This proved to be a really bad move.
Hortense also had a potential royal match early on. At the age of 13, she fielded a marriage proposal from the exiled son of the recently executed Charles I. Sensing that he had little in the way of future prospects, Cardinal Mazarin turned him down cold.
He was crowned Charles II, king of England, several months later.
Cardinal Mazarin then tried bribing him to reignite his interest with a truly ludicrous amount of money, but Charles II declined.
In the end, after rejecting a number of other suitors, Cardinal Mazarin arranged Hortense’s marriage to Armand Charles de La Porte de La Meilleraye, Prince of Conti. Armand had refused Mazarin’s offers of marriage to Hortense’s various older siblings and cousins—he had, he professed, loved Hortense and only Hortense ever since he was 24.
Problem was, he was 14 years older than her. Yeah. You do the math.
At the age of 22, Marie married wealthy Italian prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna and moved to Rome. She hated Rome, immediately chafing against the restrictions Italian society imposed on women, saying that she felt like a slave.
Moreover, her new husband was, shall we say, overly ardent. Although he would later pull out all the stops to make her feel welcome, arranging fireworks, concerts, and festivals just for her, their initial meeting set a . . . suboptimal tone. Upon meeting her face-to-face, some of the first words out of his mouth were a demand to consummate the marriage. Despite the fact that they’d never met and that she’d been deathly sick almost the entire voyage from France to Italy.
It got worse.
Hortense, however, was undoubtedly in a more dangerous situation. Although her fortunes slightly improved when her meddling uncle died, bequeathing unto her a massive fortune, her husband, Armand, turned out to be insane.
This is not an exaggeration:
• He thought the angel Gabriel spoke to him in dreams.
• He warned farm families not to let brothers and sisters sleep in bed together.
• He told his milkmaids not to spend too long milking cows or churning milk because it was too overtly sexual.
• He forbade conversation and laughter in his house.
• He chipped the teeth of his servants to make them more homely.
These are pretty tame compared to the weird stuff he pulled later.
It should not be surprising that, when it came to Hortense, Armand bore the signature marks of an abuser: he forbade her to see her friends or family, constantly belittled her, and isolated her away from the city.
For the first several years, Hortense did not stand up to Armand, to the eternal consternation of her siblings. They even had four children together. But finally, Hortense had had enough and started to pursue the unthinkable: a legal separation.
Meanwhile, Marie fared slightly better during the early years of her marriage. Sure, Lorenzo showed her off like his favorite toy, going so far as to construct an incredibly ostentatious bed from which she could receive people who came to visit her after her first pregnancy. In spite of this, she established a world independent of him, producing elaborate plays and carnivals that were the equal of any in Europe.
But after giving birth to three sons in three increasingly difficult pregnancies, she too had had enough. Knowing that during this time one in 10 women died in childbirth, she insisted on “separation of beds”—basically, cutting off the conjugal aspect of their marriage.
This did not go over well.
Armand fought tooth and nail to keep Hortense with him, locking her in the house and physically blocking her escape. When she shoved him out of the way—no mean feat as he was a general in charge of France’s military—he had her locked up in a convent.
At the convent, Hortense made a friend, Sidonie (who was herself attempting to divorce her husband). Together the two were absolute hellions: they put ink in the holy water, they flooded the nuns’ beds, they attempted escape up the convent’s chimneys, and they raced greyhounds around the building in the middle of the night.
After several years of being moved or escaping from one convent to another while pushing her case through the courts, Hortense came to a realization. Even if her separation—which had already become a cause célèbre in French circles—was successful, Armand’s political influence would doom it in appeals.
So she ran away.
Disguising herself in men’s clothing, she embarked on an arduous trip to Italy, traveling 250 miles on horseback in the first two days. Her outfit did little good—everyone recognized her as a woman, and the servant who came with her habitually called her “Madame.”
Newly free for the first time in years, Hortense celebrated by taking a young squire as a lover. This romance was short-lived, as it displeased her new roommate and landlord: her sister, Marie.
For a time, the sisters were some of the biggest celebrities in Rome. Their salons were populated by the luminaries of the age, and their plays always debuted to packed houses. Portraits of the two sisters were such a hot commodity that people would fight duels over them.
Simultaneously, Marie’s marriage was disintegrating. Although Lorenzo had kept mistresses from day one, he began to flaunt them even more openly, going so far as to impregnate Marie’s best friend, Ortensia. Twice.
Infuriated by Lorenzo and emboldened by Hortense, Marie grew even more defiant. She took her own lovers. She swam in public rivers in the middle of the day. She wore masks to her carnivals, in clear violation of contemporary law. She dressed for one carnival as a controversial warrior maiden from her favorite story. The next, she dressed as the story’s villain: a seductive sorceress whose name was virtually an epithet.
And then she found out her husband was planning to kill her.
Meanwhile, Hortense remained tethered to Armand. As she continued pressing the courts to allow for a separation, fighting her husband in the court of public opinion, she drove Armand closer and closer to the edge. He hired an army of mercenaries and lawyers to retrieve her, but she skillfully evaded every single one. All the while, she flaunted her freedom, publicly taking lovers in Rome.
Finally, in 1670, Armand lost it for good.
A huge part of the massive inheritance Hortense had received from Cardinal Mazarin was his art collection, one of the greatest in Europe. It included over 900 paintings by luminaries like Raphael, Caravaggio, and da Vinci, and hundreds of statues from Roman antiquity.
In 24 hours, Armand destroyed almost all of it.
He chipped the genitals off all of the statues with a pick. He took a bucket of black paint and splashed it on the nude paintings, to cover up
their naughty bits. In all, he did around 400,000 francs’ worth (about $17 million in 2014 US dollars) of damage before the king managed to throw him in prison.
Armand had issues.
So when offered the option of either reconciling with her husband and receiving Louis XIV’s protection or receiving a small pension and remaining in exile, Hortense understandably chose exile.
It was to be a more difficult exile than she’d reckoned.
In 1671, Marie became deathly ill. Lorenzo seemed not to care, and Marie’s maids soon found out why: they discovered an apparent plot by Lorenzo to poison her.
Soon thereafter, she fled Rome.
This was no small escape—she and Hortense put out word that they were off on a weekend trip, then crept away, in disguise, to a boat that took them up the Mediterranean.
Lorenzo was furious. Immediately, he sent out dozens of horsemen and a galley boat to intercept them. He wrote to the leaders of every neighboring country asking them to detain the women.
Marie and Hortense, now packing pistols, fought against every impediment tossed their way. When they were denied the rental of horses, they laid out bribe after bribe until someone relented. When one of Lorenzo’s messengers caught up with Marie, she sat playing guitar and declining his every request in the form of song.
As Lorenzo’s henchmen pursued them across the countryside, so too did Armand’s.
Unfortunately for Hortense, because Armand’s henchmen were significantly more cutthroat than Lorenzo’s, she repeatedly had to separate from Marie. On one occasion, she fled into the woods when one henchman got too close, leaving Marie to cheerfully misinform him as to the direction her sister had taken.
Hortense found some protection under the Duke of Savoy, one of the many previous suitors her uncle had stupidly turned down. According to some accounts, she took him as a lover as a sign of gratitude. In Savoy, Hortense grew yet bolder. When she found out that one of her ladies-in-waiting was a spy for Armand, she threw the woman out. When Armand himself appeared and demanded to see her, she locked herself in her room and barred the door until he left. She began gambling, even crafting a special mask to conceal her tells.
Most boldly, she did something utterly unprecedented for noble women: she wrote her memoirs. By this point, the Mancini sisters had been so much the focus of court gossip, and their reputations so savaged, that Hortense felt the need to take ownership of her public image and set the record straight. She started the book with the declaration that “a woman’s reputation depends on not being talked about”—and then proceeded to do just that.
Her memoir is one of the first written by a French woman without the cloak of anonymity. It became an instant hit across Europe, getting translated into English and Italian with lightning speed.
And then, in 1675, the Duke of Savoy died. Of poison.
Meanwhile, Marie had determined that her best course of action was to head to Madrid. She was unable to plan much for this journey, since Lorenzo’s spies were watching her every move. Compounding her problems was the fact that much of Europe was in open warfare at this point and the route to Madrid was replete with bandits and combat zones.
Nevertheless, she headed out, only to be caught by Lorenzo’s men in Belgium. There she was detained by a sadistic jailer, who bolted extra bars onto her windows and forbade her to speak with anyone, man or woman. Gradually word of her situation leaked out, and political pressure forced Lorenzo to free her.
When she finally made it to Madrid, she found it, too, crawling with Lorenzo’s spies. Despite her growing popularity, Marie’s attempts at solidifying new political alliances consistently ran afoul of Lorenzo’s meddling. The move proved a worthless attempt at escape.
In 1675, she came across a copy of Hortense’s memoirs. Then she found a copy of her own memoirs—except she’d never written any memoirs. She never found out who the impostor was, but it was clearly someone close to her. Even so, many of the details were wrong. Marie took special exception to her portrayal at the end as a poor helpless woman imprisoned in Belgium.
So she wrote her own memoirs. Just like Hortense, she set the record straight and took control of her public identity.
The book was also a massive success.
After the Duke of Savoy died, Hortense, sensing she was no longer welcome, headed to London. This, too, was a perilous journey. Entire villages along the European coast had been abandoned in the throes of war, and she was just one woman traveling alone. However, by this point Hortense had learned to effectively manipulate her public image, and she used this journey to portray herself as “Queen of the Amazons.”
Once in London, she became the mistress of her old suitor, Charles II, and set up another intellectual salon. It proved quite popular, especially with the dice-playing set, who referred to it as a “gambling academy.”
Hortense’s romances were by no means limited to just Charles II during her 10 years in London. One of her other notable conquests was Charles’s 14-year-old daughter, Anne of Sussex. The duo caused waves when they were found at night in a park, wearing nothing but their nightgowns. They were fencing. When Anne was forcibly separated from Hortense, according to rumor, Anne spent her days in bed, mournfully kissing a doll of her former lover.
After Anne, Hortense entered into a brief dalliance with the king of Monaco, which resulted in the temporary suspension of her pension from a jealous Charles. After that ended, she was embroiled in another scandal. Two of her admirers had fought each other in a duel, resulting in the death of the loser. The victorious party was one of the most bizarre men to ever be infatuated with Hortense: her 17-year-old nephew.
(No, she hadn’t slept with him.)
All in all, Hortense’s 10 years in London marked some of the happiest in her life. As a special favorite of the king, she enjoyed a privileged and peculiarly respected role in English society, insulated from the repeated lawsuits of her husband.
And then Charles II died.
Meanwhile, Lorenzo had been relentlessly continuing his attempts to have Marie thrown in jail, and he was finally successful. After some of the Spanish monarchs protecting Marie died, Lorenzo managed to send guards to toss her into the Alcázar fortress.
She went out fighting—literally. She stabbed her assailants with a knife. In return, they dragged her by her hair and tossed her into prison, where she remained for three months. During those three months, her son, whom she’d been trying to see for close to a decade, got married. She was not allowed to attend.
Finally, in 1681, after 20 years of marriage, she and Lorenzo were separated—but only on terms that preserved his public image. She was to enter a convent, and he a monastery. With both parties forbidden by religious edicts to engage in matrimony, their marriage could be annulled, thereby saving face for everyone involved.
The convent Marie entered was, by all accounts, more of a day spa than a prison. She was allowed to come and go as she pleased and even to keep pets. To mark the occasion, she got a spaniel. She gave it a gold collar, bracelets, and earrings.
Time and distance had not tempered Armand in the slightest. In a letter from the period, he starts out swearing that “menaces, prayers, rewards, punishments, the loss of fortune, or even of life itself” will never deter him from persecuting Hortense. He then, in the same letter, immediately pivots, promising, should she return to him, to be “the most humble, the most tender husband that anyone could ever imagine.”
Unfortunately, without the protective umbrella of Charles II, Hortense’s prospects diminished. She refused to leave London, but in the absence of any income and the presence of growing gambling debts, she had few options.
In the final year of her life she rapidly declined into alcoholism. Some claim that she became involved in a romantic triangle with her own daughter, vying for the attention of an English duke, but the available evidence is contradictory. In the centuries after her death, virtually every person she’d ever met—but especially her rapscallion friend Sidonie
from the convent—was rumored to have been one of her lovers.
But even death does not bring an end to Hortense’s story.
Shortly before his death, Lorenzo apologized to Marie for how shamefully he’d treated her. While Marie’s writings indicate some lingering tenderness toward him, Lorenzo’s own sister held no such feelings: upon his death, she declared that “he had lived like an assassin and a hedonist.”
Marie lived another 25 years, during which time she freely wandered about Europe, finally able to do as she pleased. She died of a stroke in Pisa and is buried where she fell. Her tombstone merely reads thus:
MARIA MANCINI COLONNA, DUST AND ASHES.
The afterlife of Hortense’s corpse reads like the blackest comedy imaginable. Upon her death, her creditors seized her body, quickly embalmed it, and had it arrested for failure to pay. In the end, the massive amount of money was paid out—by the one man determined to have her at all costs: her husband, Armand.
Armand then tossed her body into a cart and hauled it around northern France, taking it to all the places she’d hated going. It was only after four months, at the insistence of virtually everyone in his family, that he buried poor Hortense.
The effects of the Mancini sisters’ lives were felt long after their deaths. By the time they had both died, women across England, France, and Italy were bringing divorce cases to the courts. The legal techniques that both Hortense and Marie had employed were put to the test by scores of women in equally desperate situations. Intellectual salons all across Europe were abuzz with debate over the justness of separation. And as women worldwide read the memoirs of the Mancinis, they began to consider the validity of writing their own.
